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Giving New Doctors the Tools They Need

They say if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wonder, then, why my toolbox often seems so inadequate for fixing my patients.

I open one recent afternoon in clinic with a middle-aged man I’ve come to know well. He’s drunk. His breath smells of alcohol and he slurs his words. He tells me his brother’s in jail, his mother died, and he punched a neighbor who tried to steal his wallet. In the past year, he’s been admitted to the hospital countless times for everything from falling to getting injured in a fight to failing to take his medications.

“High risk for readmission,” an automated email plops into my inbox each time he’s admitted. Thanks, I’m on it.

I search for mental health and substance use resources we haven’t yet exhausted. I speak briefly with a psychiatrist and case manager and a social worker who is arranging transportation back to the housing he’s in danger of being thrown out of.

“Maybe we increase his mood-stabilizer?” I offer, mostly just to say something. When all you have is a hammer…

The afternoon doesn’t get easier. I see a patient whose heart failure had been in good control with a telemedicine service that had checked his weight at home and adjusted his medications accordingly. But the service has been cancelled, and now he’s in our clinic, gasping for air as fluid fills his lungs.

He’s followed by an older man who’s been on opioid painkillers for a decade — and who I now suspect is selling extra pills on the street. I’m running 45 minutes late by the time I greet an understandably frustrated woman who, a computer alert informs me, is overdue for her first colonoscopy. She balks when I bring it up, and I don’t have the words or the time to convince her otherwise.

The afternoon was not unusual. At the end of most days, I find myself searching for nails that I can hammer.

Part of the problem is the tool kit we assemble during medical training. We’re educated largely in a biomedical framework. We diagnose disease with textbook knowledge and prescribe medications because those are the hammers we have.

But consider the skills I would need to be more effective in just this one clinic session: understanding social issues that contribute to health; marshaling support resources like case management, social work and rehabilitation centers; exploring my patients’ values and goals and encouraging behavior change; leading interdisciplinary care teams; employing new technologies and methods of patient engagement like telemedicine; and appreciating how health systems fit together to influence an individual patient’s care — from home care and community centers to clinics and hospitals. None have traditionally been emphasized in medical education — and, unsurprisingly, doctors in training like myself are often ill-equipped to practice in today’s health care environment.

Medicine has long been a discipline predicated on memorization, which made sense in a world of textbooks, microscopes and information monopoly. But rooting medical training primarily in knowledge acquisition is increasingly insufficient and inefficient. In an era of big data, Google and iPhones, doctors don’t so much need to know as they need to access, synthesize and apply. We’re increasingly asked to consider not just patients, but communities. We’re expected to practice not as individuals, but as team members. And now — liberated from carrying every diagnostic and treatment detail around in our heads — we have both the responsibility and the luxury of deciding what a doctor should be in the 21st century.

Some medical educators are trying to figure it out, with a greater emphasis on new technologies, collaborative care, wellness and community health.

The new Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, Austin, which enrolls its first class in June, is hoping to revolutionize medical education. The school plans to focus on helping students understand how health systems, communities and social issues contribute to individual health through a variety of innovative methods.

Instead of traditional lecture halls, Dell’s students will learn in collaborative workspaces with a curriculum that emphasizes team-based management of patients. They’ll take weekly classes with pharmacy, nursing, social work and engineering students. Dell’s “Innovation, Leadership and Discovery” program affords students an entire year to pursue projects related to population health and delivery system redesign.

Dell also features a unique collaboration with the university’s College of Fine Arts — known as the Design Institute for Health — to bring design thinking to health care. Here students will learn to think about everything from better hospital gowns and more hospitable hospital rooms to how patients access services online and how to make waiting rooms obsolete.

“It’s an incredible gift to start from scratch,” said Dr. Clay Johnston, the school’s first dean. “We can start by looking at where the biggest gaps and problems are. Then say, O.K., given those needs, what should doctors and the medical system look like in the future?”

The health system Kaiser Permanente recently announced its own plans to open a medical school in 2019, in Pasadena, Calif. The medical school, like the health system, will emphasize integrated care, the latest medical evidence and new technologies like online doctor visits.

“We recognize the importance of providing care in alternate settings,” says Dr. Edward Ellison, who is helping to oversee the creation of the school. “We’ll take care of you when you’re sick. But we’ll also help you stay healthy when you’re home.”

While most medical schools are trying to get students out of lecture halls and into hospitals, Kaiser Permanente hopes to get students out of hospitals and into communities. Students will visit patients in their homes to see how they live and what behavior change looks like in living rooms instead of hospital rooms. They’ll also be trained as emergency medical technicians — riding in ambulances alongside other medical professionals, responding to accidents, violence and trauma in their communities.

The American Medical Association, for its part, has provided over $11 million to established medical schools to reimagine their curricula and better prepare students for a rapidly evolving health care environment.

Older physicians, medical educators, policy makers and patients will continue to debate what doctors should be taught and what they should know. But the deeper question is how doctors can learn to think — to solve problems that can’t be solved with the tools we currently have. Because ultimately, there’s no better hammer than that.

Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P. is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter: @DhruvKhullar.